| Abstract | This article is an exploration of the dynamics of contemporary colonialism in the Canadian settler nation-state in the context of programs of teacher education. From my perspective as a settler-scholar-teacher working in teacher education, I explore the imposition of Western forms of knowledge production in higher education in settler dominated academic spaces. Through a coloniality lens, I consider the ways that educational spaces in higher education continue to support and perpetuate structures of colonialism through an epistemic monoculture based in Western scientific materialism. I particularly explore the ways the imposition of a Western secular cosmology silences and resists Indigenous knowledges, pedagogies and perspectives in institutional spaces. Through story and scholarship, I draw out the complexity of epistemic dominance and problematic discourses that manifest in pedagogical encounters in programs of teacher education. Reflecting on the epistemic collisions that emerge in these encounters, I consider decolonial pedagogical practices with adult students that trouble problematic narratives and discourses that are pervasively shared in Canadian society, and engage expectantly, meaningfully and generatively with forms of resistance that arise in this complex context. |
